by Walter
Chaw Alexander Payne's (Citizen Ruth, Election)
third film is his best. He (like Wes Anderson and his
third film, TheRoyal Tenenbaums)
has come into his own as an auteur voice for a new American cinema that
finds its underpinnings in David Lynch and John Cassavetes--in the
Midwest grotesque and the elevation of the banal. In relating a
Prufrockian tale of a man reassessing the ruin of his life upon the
occasion of his retirement from a life-insurance firm, Payne strikes a
balance between absurdity and pithiness, becoming in the process the
sort of satire that exposes essential truths about the disintegrating
spiral of life and the human condition. Married as it is to another
wonderful late-career performance by Jack Nicholson, About
Schmidt is heartbreaking and brilliant.

Schmidt
(Nicholson) is getting toasted and roasted in a Midwest restaurant as
the film opens, the guest of honour at his own wake, poised on the
precipice of retirement and decrepitude. With a slow, deliberate amble,
Payne and writing partner Jim Taylor allow Nicholson to twist in the
crucible of his own obsolescence, indicting the suburban milk-fed
malaise into which a certain gentry inevitably falls. With his grown
daughter Jeannie (Hope Davis) set to marry a well-meaning toad named
Randall (Dermot Mulroney), Schmidt, following the death of his wife, Helen (June
Squibb), takes to the Winnebago and goes on a quest to Denver
to prevent his daughter from making what he sees as the biggest mistake
of her life. In so trying, Schmidt comes to understand that his real
contribution is allowing Jeannie to make her own mistakes.

Potentially
trite, About Schmidt's American gothic is an edged
document of life after conventional productivity--a picture interested
in core questions of identity and progeny that finds humour in the
peccadilloes of Jeannie's hippie in-laws (Kathy Bates and Howard
Hesseman) and a bridging narrative of Schmidt's continuing
correspondence with an anonymous African orphan sponsored through a
weepy infomercial. Like many films of this quality, though there are
myriad opportunities for big speeches and epic gestures, the movements
and plot points are subtle and lightly drawn. Consider Schmidt's toast
to his daughter and her husband and how a lesser filmmaker would have
pulled up a soapbox or attempted to summarize his hero's plight.

Nicholson's
performance is perhaps his quietest. Mature as is befitting his age and
stature (compare Nicholson's output of late to De Niro's horrific rot),
the actor appears entirely comfortable in the skin of a
well-intentioned failure. Always at his best as a character involved in
the process of defining his place in a broken family dynamic (a plight
closest to his own peculiar family experience), Nicholson's turn as
Schmidt is as affecting an everyman for the aging new millennium as his
disaffected Robert Dupea was for roughly the same generation about
thirty-two years ago. Possible bookends for a legendary career, About
Schmidt is a road film and a character study very much like Five
Easy Pieces, and a fable of reconciliation poignant and
pointed.Originally
published: January 3, 2003.

THE DVDby Bill Chambers I
forgot how much I love About Schmidt when
I popped the disc in, and I was momentarily nonplussed by the DVD's
weird menus, which make the movie out to be a different kind of quirky
than it is. No matter, this is another jewel in New Line's digital
crown--a glowing example of how to present even an intimate character
study so that it qualitatively competes with high-profile blockbusters,
which generally receive the better DVD transfers. Lushness imbues the
1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen image, transforming the overcast visuals
into a series of pretty tableaux. The sound is less
likely to
astound, though the barely distinguishable DTS and Dolby Digital 5.1
mixes do offer a few interesting passages of discrete audio, such as a
background argument between Larry and Roberta after Schmidt first
arrives in Denver.

There's a slim selection of
supplementary material on board starting with nine deleted scenes, each
with text introductions written by Alexander Payne that offer
better-than-usual justifications for the cuts (one bit was snipped for
being "too film-schooly" (damn if he isn't right), another--an
ingenious homage to Five Easy Pieces--because Payne
feared the
explicit quotation of another Jack Nicholson vehicle would take the
audience out of the picture; talk about overestimating modern
moviegoers, the vast majority of whom only know Nicholson from Batman),
as well as five "Woodmen Tower Sequences": Payne instructed his editing
team to individually come up with a sequence establishing Schmidt's
place of business from reams of second-unit footage. Of these
experiments, I liked editor Danya Joseph's the most, for she let her
imagination run wild, devising a prologue that seems to send up Cannon
productions from the 1980s. In other words, she's not just trying to
get picked. Trailers for About Schmidt, I
Am Sam, and the upcoming Kathy Bates starrer Unconditional
Love round out the disc, which also has ROM links to the
film's website and childreach.org. Originally published: May 23,
2003.